“Stop trying to plug that shit in. Your hands are shaking.”

“I’ll do it myself,” Pradav insisted.

“Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it,” Harley said. “That prototype is fragile.”

The latest iteration of their mutual project was sitting on a table, waiting for the final touches. After months of highly aggravated “co-operation”, Harley and Pradav felt they were getting closer to a working prototype. Though they were no closer to a meaningful sharing of information. Pradav was still handling most of the neural coding, while Harley handled the complex sensory networks, neither trusting any of their secrets to the other.

“I know what I’m doing,” Pradav insisted.

“Only about half the time. I know you’re lucid right now, but your hands aren’t,” Harley said. “Tell me how the shit works.”

“I will hand over my knowledge of Alpha 3O1 if you hand over yours,” Pradav insisted. “I will not have you taking sole credit for the success of this project.”

“I’ll be the only one around to get credit anyway, you’ll be dead,” Harley snapped. “Don’t try and hold for applause while you’re on your way offstage, you old fuck.”

Pradav stopped working for a moment. In spite of his best attempts to steady them, his hands kept shaking.

“For once in your life, actually do it for the science,” Harley said. “You don’t need to tell me everything. Just enough to make the connections.”

It took a long time for Pradev to silently nod his head and step away from the prototype. Harley put her gloves on and stepped up.

“Might wanna rein in the contemplative silences too,” Harley said. “You don’t got that much time to waste.”

“You are remarkably disrespectful to the dying.”

“Nah, just to you,” Harley said. “And any other dying assholes. My grandpa was an alcoholic piece of shit and I told him so. Don’t want to get disrespected on your deathbed, don’t be an ass when you’re alive, I always say.”

Pradav scoffed at the notion and then got the experiment back on track. He explained the various functions he had programmed into the new robotic mind, and the ways it had to be carefully connected to Harley’s sensory equipment. She made every move with a steady hand, and carefully assembled the full mechanism before enclosing it inside a white sphere slightly larger than a golf ball.

“There we go,” Harley said. She switched open the iris lenses that covered the tiny head’s mechanical eyes. “Hello, Botley.”

“We are not calling the crowning achievement of twenty-first century robotics ‘Botley’,” Pradav said.

“Maybe you’re not, but everyone else will,” Harley said. “You’ll be too dead to correct them.”

“Oh just plug it in and stop mocking my inevitable death,” Pradav said. Harley did so, attaching the sensory suite to the rest of the mechanical body and then carrying the entire construct into a small side chamber. To properly test the robot’s learning capability, they had prepared an isolated “sensory room” with several opportunities for the robot to observe and adapt. Harley placed the body in the center of the room and then left, shutting the door behind her, to go sit with Pradav at the observation desk.

“Flip the switch, bitch,” Harley said.

Pradav flipped a switch. Nothing happened. Then he flipped it again.

“Pradav.”

“What? I’m flipping the switch!”

“I just said that for the rhyme,” Harley clarified. “Power on is connected to the red button. The one that says ‘power’ on it.”

Pradav looked down at his console and saw the plainly labeled button. Harley had made sure every function was labeled in hopes of preventing this exact situation.

“I- I see,” Pradav said. “Wait, what did I just switch on and off, then?”

“Nothing. Anything without a label doesn’t actually do anything. I just like having a lot of buttons. Makes me feel sciencey.”

A few weeks ago, Pradav would’ve groaned at that remark. Now it barely registered. He was suffering from severe overexposure to Harley. He didn’t know if the symptoms of that were better or worse than dementia.

In lieu of contemplating his varied suffering, Pradav hit the button and powered on their experiment. After a short delay, the spark of life spread through the tiny robot, and it began to move. It was slow, at first, as the burgeoning mind adapted to the fact that it had actual limbs to move with, and eyes to see with. The robot twitched for a moment, looked around the room, and froze in place.

“That’s new,” Pradav mumbled. All of their past iterations had tried moving around first. They’d moved in random, logicless patterns, but they had moved.

“Give it a minute,” Harley said.

“Oh, now we can waste my time,” Pradav snipped.

“It’s for science.”

“Two minutes,” Pradav said. “I need to take notes anyway.”

The robot remained motionless as Pradav started to jot down extensive, and mostly negative, notes. Harley glanced at his notes from time to time, and usually saw every success being credited to Pradav, while every failure was apparently her fault. She’d be sure to set those notes on fire later. For now, she put her full attention on the robot. Not that there was much to see.

One and a half minutes of observation passed in complete silence, and the robot continued to do nothing. After the initial twitching had passed, the robot had locked itself in an awkward pose and showed no signs of moving.

“I knew I shouldn’t have let you make the connections,” Pradav said. “You must have failed the motor connectors.”

“That’s the easiest shit in the whole robot, you old bastard,” Harley said. “I didn’t even need your-”

Harley stopped herself when she saw the slightest hint of movement out of the corner of her eye. The machine hadn’t moved any of it’s limbs, but the irised lenses on its eyes had shifted.

“Hold on.”

“What? Is it glitching even more severely now?”

“No, it’s…”

Harley took an even closer look, focusing on the eyes. The irised lenses were dilating at odd intervals, and the focusing cameras within were shifting very slightly. The robot wasn’t moving, but it was observing. And reacting.

“It’s scared,” Harley said.

She got out of her seat and walked to the door of the sealed chamber, in spite of Pradav’s protests. When the door opened, the robot finally moved, scuttling backwards from the sudden noise and motion. It pressed its back against the far wall as Harley stepped in and took a seat on the opposite side of the room. Only after she saw the robot freeze again did she realize she really didn’t have much of a plan.

“Okay, this is fun,” Harley mumbled to herself. “You’ve got no language, no food incentive, no pack bonding instinct. How the hell do I tell you I’m a friend?”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

In order to avoid tainting the consciousness they were trying to create from scratch, Harley and Pradav had given it no pre-programmed information beyond what it needed to move it’s body. Harley was starting to regret that now. They’d created a thinking entity that had no idea where it was, or even what it was.

“Uh...Hi, I’m Harley,” she said, pointing to herself. Then she pointed to the tiny robot. “You are Botley.”

The muffled screams of protest from outside the chamber made it clear Pradav still didn’t like the name Botley. Harley still didn’t care. Botley likewise had no reaction to the name, since he had no idea what a name was, or what language was.

“Fu- okay, new plan,” Harley said. She stopped herself, to avoid teaching a brand new entity to swear within it’s first five minutes of existence. Botley still had his back pressed against the wall. Harley had an idea. She stood, and pressed her own back to the wall, perfectly mimicking Botley’s posture.

Botley’s golfball sized head rotated curiously. Harley rotated her head to match, and tried not to smile. Self-recognition through the other. Worked every time. She assumed. She was a roboticist, not a philosopher.

The cycle of Botley making a motion and Harley mimicking it repeated a few times before Harley dared to change the pattern. After copying a wave of Botley’s arm, she extended a hand and pointed a finger in his direction.

After a moment of silent contemplation, Botley extended his own hand, and pointed a tiny finger right back at her.

“There we go,” Harley said. She stepped closer, and Botley mirrored her motion exactly. Harley repeated the process, always giving Botley time to observe and respond on his own terms. He never retreated from her, though, and within a few steps they were almost face to face. Or face to shin, rather. Botley was very short.

“Hi, Botley.”

Unable to speak a response, Botley extended a hand in Harley’s direction. She reached down and gently grabbed his hand.

Harley had been expecting that the bold move might make Botley retreat, but it did quite the opposite. His little metal hands latched on to Harley and he actually began to climb up her arm, stopping occasionally to prod her skin or tug at her clothes curiously.

“Oh, okay, that’s definitely something,” Harley said. Botley reached her shoulder, tugged at her hair once, and then started clambering across her back and around to her chest. “Hey, watch- ow, okay, definitely should’ve made those grabbers less pinchy, that’s -those are my boobs, thank you, no touchy.”

While Harley didn’t want to interfere with Botley’s progressive learning, she also didn’t want to be the first person to get molested by a robot. She grabbed Botley by the sides of his chassis and held him at arm’s length. Botley did not object to being held, so Harley kept him there for a second.

“I wasn’t expecting you to be so rambunctious,” Harley said. AI’s in movies were always so philosophical and contemplative. Botley was more interested in poking Harley’s arm than pondering the nature of his own existence. “You’re like a little puppy, aren’t you.”

Harley dropped Botley off in front of one of their sensory experiments, a small spinning wheel with several clacking components. Botley spun it once and then immediately lost interest, preferring to climb up Harley’s leg and latch on to the waist of her pants.

“Hey, that tickles,” Harley said, as Botley prodded her stomach with a curious finger. “You’re pretty interested in people, huh?”

Botley latched on to her arm as she grabbed him and moved him onto her shoulder.

“Wish I had people to introduce you to besides Pradav,” Harley said. “And yes, I know you can hear me.”

Botley settled in to her shoulder and rested there comfortably as Harley sighed.

“Better get it over with, then,” Harley said. “I really wish you knew words so I could prepare you for how much this is going to suck.”

Oblivious to the horrors he was about to face, Botley watched the open door curiously, and then looked around the laboratory with eager eyes, until he latched on to Pradav.

“While I would have preferred you not taint our sample with unnecessary interactions, it seemed the experiment worked,” Pradav said. “Take Alpha-3O1 to the table for further experimentation.”

The “table” he spoke of had a large number of tools and other unpleasant instruments of probing laid out on it. Good for assembling, or disassembling, machinery.

“Uh...no, actually,” Harley said. “It worked, we’re done. We have all the notes we need to make another one. We don’t need to go digging around in Botley’s head.”

“A small scale apparent success is not a real victory,” Pradav said. He grabbed a small cutting tool and tested the edge. “You talk about science. You should know it requires further analysis.”

“Not on a subject that’s capable of feeling fear,” Harley said. Botley, clueless to the debate regarding its own existence, tried crawling off of Harley to go examine Pradav. She snatched it away from the older roboticist. and held it close to her chest. “Some people actually consider ethics part of science too, you know.”

“And those people, like you, are imbeciles,” Pradav said. “Your contributions to this project are appreciated, Harley, but your role is over. Hand over my machine.”

“Over my dead body.”

Pradav didn’t take his hands off the cutting tool. It took Harley a second to realize the unspoken.

“Oh.”

“Give it to me, Harley.”

In spite of the rumbling gravitas to his voice, Harley just laughed.

“You realize you’re like, old as fuck, right?” Harley said. “You are literally dying. Why would I be afraid of you?”

“You need not be afraid of me,” Pradav grumbled. “But you should be afraid of this!”

Pradav reached into his coat pocket and withdrew a hidden remote. He pressed a single button, and a disguised mechanism in the laboratory door swung open. The small side chamber contained a towering robot, armed to teeth with bladed weapons and ballistic weaponry. The most powerful death machine Pradav had ever created, programmed to do only one thing: kill Harley.

The robot tilted forward slightly and fell face-first to the floor, kicking up a cloud of dust as it landed. Harley rolled her eyes while Pradav stared at his fallen bot.

“What did you do to my death machine?”

“Pradav, this is the fourth time you’ve deployed the death bot since we started,” Harley said. “You still haven’t even charged the battery!”

Harley was as offended by the shoddy workmanship as she was by the multiple attempts to kill her. Even accounting for the memory loss, Pradav was still being sloppy. He could at least leave himself a sticky note or something.

“Oh. I...uh. Hmm.”

Botley crawled down from Harley’s shoulder and poked the inert death bot. Harley wondered if the little guy recognized that it was a machine like him, or if he was just curious about it in general.

“Now what?” Harley said. “You got some other secret murder weapon you want to watch fall over? Or can I leave and take Botley with me?”

“You won’t- damn it all, I…”

Pradav looked at the remote in his hands and pressed the buttons a few times. The door to the killbot closet opened and shut a few times, but nothing else happened. Harley stared skeptically as Pradav’s arm drooped limp at his side.

“You done?”

“I no. It isn’t.”

“Pradav, I’m not falling for this routine again.,” Harley said. “You’re not guilt-tripping me into packing up the killbot again.”

She’d done it once, just because she didn’t want a big pile of guns and knives in the middle of her workspace, but she was not going to do it again.

“Wha?”

Pradav turned to her in confusion. Only one of his pupils was dilated.

“Uh oh.”

Harley grabbed Botley and covered his eyes, but not her own.

----------------------------------------

“And that’s how I met Botley, and also learned what the symptoms of a stroke are,” Harley said. Vell couldn’t actually tell if the smile on her face was fake or not. Botley was also proving difficult to read, though he had no facial expressions to begin with.

“That’s...uh…”

“Oh it’s wicked fucked up, I know,” Harley said. “It’s a good thing Pradav was a murderous sociopath or watching him die might’ve actually fucked me up way more than it did.”

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“I mean, I am now,” Harley said. “I did do some therapy. Turns out you can just do that if you got mental problems. You guys should try it.”

“My parents won’t let me,” Lee said.

“Most of my trauma is completely impossible to explain to a normal human being,” Vell said.

“Both excellent points,” Harley said. “Good thing you guys got me and my mental stability hanging around.”

“Indeed. I struggle to think where I might be without you,” Lee admitted.

“Eh, you’d be fine,” Harley said. Then she grabbed Vell’s shoulder and shook him. “Vell’d be fucked, though. This dude’s hopeless.”

“True. I’d be doomed without Harley,” Vell said. “I don’t know how I survived the twenty-one years of my life before I met you.”

“Technically you only survived about twelve of them, but eh,” Harley said.

“I suppose that’s true,” Vell admitted. “Kim?”

“Huh? Did I miss something?”

Kim had started to space out when the story ended and the other three got all mushy.

“You were the one who asked about Botley in the first place,” Vell said. “Did your question get answered?”

“Uh, sort of,” Kim said. “I’m not even sure what I was hoping to get out of that story. Doesn’t really help me figure out what I am.”

“Sorry I can’t be more help,” Harley said. She gave Botley a quick pat on his round head. “I’ve been trying to figure this little guy out, but Pradav took a lot of the secrets to his grave. He was a bastard, but he was a smart bastard.”

Botley accepted the headpat and then trotted across the table, towards Kim, who just stared down at him. While they were similar in some ways, those ways were shallow. They were more akin to a human and a dog than two humans.

“Thanks for trying, but...I feel like this didn’t help much,” Kim said.

“You never know,” Harley said. “Most journeys don’t get completed in one big leap. You’ve got to take a bunch of tiny steps to get where you want to go.”

“Huh. Maybe,” Kim admitted. “Thanks.”

“Any time. I am the emotionally lode-bearing friend, after all.”

“Still,” Lee said. “Don’t ever feel like you have to bear all the burden. We’re here for you if you need us.”

With their combination lunch time and story time over, everyone began to pack up and head for class. A few more concerns were aimed in Harley’s direction, but she brushed them all away.

“You guys worry too much,” Harley said. “I’m fine.”

She waved off the last of their concerns and walked away, still holding Botley in her arms. She gave his round head a pat.

“Just fine,” she mumbled to no one.